VJ Books Presents Author Perri O'Shaughnessy!
 Perri
O'Shaughnessy is the pen-name for two people, Pamela and Mary
O'Shaughnessy, sisters. The authors' pseudonym is an homage to Perry
Mason, the man who never met a guilty client, and a melding of their
two first names, Pamela and Mary. Pamela graduated from Harvard Law
School and was a trial lawyer for sixteen years. Mary is a former
editor and writer for multimedia projects. They are the authors of
eleven bestselling Nina Reilly novels as well as a collection of short
crime fiction.
After law school, two trips trekking and mountain
climbing in the Himalaya, and a stint at UMass Boston, Pam took her
first real law job at a small firm in Carmel, California. There was
plenty of work defending pot growers in Big Sur, handling divorces and
whatever else came through the door. When their mother got her law
degree, she and Pam formed the Monterey California firm of
O'Shaughnessy and O'Shaughnessy - which must have been one of the first
mother-daughter law firms around.
Pam practiced law in Monterey,
San Pablo, and Lake Tahoe for sixteen years before the success of the
Nina Reilly series prompted her to leave the profession. Pam, a
small-town general lawyer with plenty of courtroom work, married a land
surveyor named Mike and had a son. She claims Tahoe offered the most
fascinating cases because of the gambling, free-flowing sex, and money,
and huge numbers of people passing through, not to mention the grandeur
of the mountains and lake.
Mary and Brad have three children.
They settled down near San Francisco and haven't moved much, unlike
Pam, who continued the odyssey their parents had begun. Pam moved to
New York to Hawaii and back to Tahoe, among many places. She also now
lives in northern California.
Around 1993, Mary and Pam began
writing together. Pam had plots and poetry, and Mary had studied
creative writing even in the years after college.
"Our first
manuscript, written over several years, featured a paralegal named Nina
Reilly who worked for a law firm in Carmel, California. It landed us a
wonderful agent, but by then we had moved on and written something
smoother and better developed. For ages, that first Nina Reilly novel
gathered dust. In between working and raising families, we wrote a
second book together. With the help of that amazing and estimable
agent, Nancy Yost of New York's Lowenstein-Yost Associates, Inc.,
Perri's second try sold. In this, Perri's first published novel,
Motion to Suppress,
Nina Reilly runs from a bad marriage to South Lake Tahoe, putting out
her shingle, and like Pam, taking whatever cases walk through her door.
We've had many requests over the years for a peek at that first story
of a young Nina. Well prepare yourself for December 2008's
Show No Fear.
With the delicate but forceful attention of the talented Maggie
Crawford at Simon and Schuster, Perri's first novel is coming to get
you. Since then we have written thirteen books together, including one
collection of short stories."
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